National Petition for Fairer Transportation Fares For Polytechnic / Tertiary Students

On November 12, 2008 · 14 Comments · In The Ingterneck
National Petition for Fairer Transportation Fares for Polytechnic/ Tertiary Students
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Dear Bernard,

My name is Ben­jamin Lee, and I am also known as Mr Miyagi. I must be get­ting old, because I felt a lit­tle peeved that you were so pre­sump­tu­ous, address­ing me as “Friend” when I hardly know you.

I have re-read your email sev­eral times and, as I was say­ing about my advanc­ing age, I seem to keep miss­ing the word “please” any­where in your request for my endorse­ment of your cam­paign apart from ask­ing me to “please kindly send my logo/header/diagram.“

How­ever, I do “wish to encour­age youths of today to make a dif­fer­ence and take own­er­ship of the des­tiny of this nation”, and I do believe it begins with cour­tesy and good man­ners. The link between Fairer Trans­porta­tion Fares and the des­tiny of this nation is a lit­tle more ten­u­ous, but I’m will­ing to give this a shot.

I, like you, believe that stu­dents should have cheaper pub­lic trans­port fares too. I mean, you are the future of our nation, and once you stop hav­ing to worry about unaf­ford­able fares, you’ll have time to learn to write nicer and more cour­te­ous emails to older, crankier folk like myself who have no right what­so­ever in ask­ing for lower trans­port costs.

You have my endorse­ment.

Warmest regards,
Ben­jamin

P.S. Your organization’s name is too long. If I were to pause and read out the whole thing, I’d miss my bus stop.

P.P.S. I can’t find how to down­load your logo. Please help this old man.

On 11/11/2008, at 11:54 PM, petition4fairtransport@gmail.com wrote:

Hi Friend,

My name is Bernard Chen, 23, a stu­dent at Temasek Poly­tech­nic, one of 10 young Sin­ga­pore­ans, who are ini­ti­at­ing a nation­wide National Peti­tion for Fairer Trans­porta­tion Fares for Polytechnic/ Ter­tiary Stu­dents to col­lect between 30,000 to 100,000 actual sig­na­tures of support.

For more infor­ma­tion on this nation­wide cam­paign, please refer to http://www.petition4fairtransport.org

We would like to obtain your offi­cial endorse­ment to pro­mote this youth campaign.

If you wish to encour­age youths of today to make a dif­fer­ence and take own­er­ship of the des­tiny of this nation, please kindly send your logo/ header/ diagram/ pic­ture to petition4fairtransport@gmail.com. Basi­cally, we need some­thing that read­ers can iden­tify you with.

We will be putting your your logo/ header/ diagram/ pic­ture up on our web­site under the “Endorse­ments” page and vis­i­tors to our web­site will be able to access your site through a direct link found on the logo/ header that you have pro­vided us.

We would also appre­ci­ate if you could put up our cam­paign logo on your website.

We are pleased to also announce that TheOn­lineCit­i­zen (http://theonlinecitizen.com) is the offi­cial media chan­nel for this campaign.

I must reit­er­ate that we are a non-profit organ­i­sa­tion, just a sin­cere group seek­ing your valu­able support.

If you require more infor­ma­tion, do feel free to con­tact me @ (+65) XXX-XXX-XX.

With your offi­cial endorse­ment, we will be tak­ing a giant leap towards a suc­cess­ful peti­tion campaign.

Thank you!

–
Regards,
Organiser(s) of the National Peti­tion for Fairer Trans­porta­tion Fares for Polytechnic/ Ter­tiary Stu­dents
Web­site: http://www.petition4fairtransport.orgEmail: petition4fairtransport@gmail.com

Note: To be fair — Bernard did write imme­di­ately to apol­o­gise, and was exceed­ingly cour­te­ous, but I won’t pub­lish it here because it’s not funny the way a rude email is, you know?
Update: Silly me, Bernard attached the logo in the email. I should always check for attach­ments whether or not the sender tells me it’s attached. Here ’tis:

Campaign Logo (Internet).jpg

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  • ddd

    (1) ‘My name is Bernard Chen, 23, a stu­dent at Temasek Poly­tech­nic, one of 10 young Sin­ga­pore­ans, who are ini­ti­at­ing a nation­wide National Peti­tion for Fairer Trans­porta­tion Fares for Polytechnic/ Ter­tiary Stu­dents to col­lect between 30,000 to 100,000 actual sig­na­tures of sup­port.’ it is dis­cour­te­ous to send writ­ten requests rid­dled with gram­mar mis­takes. i know my com­ments are also full of errors but i’m not ask­ing any­one for a favour.

    (2) what exactly are ‘actual sig­na­tures’? what are sig­na­tures that are not actual?

    (3) how is the peti­tion rel­e­vant to tak­ing ‘own­er­ship of the des­tiny of this nation’?

    (4) what exactly is G10 peti­tion­ing? that non-tertiary and non-polytechnic stu­dents should pay higher fares? Would that be fair to ter­tiary and poly­tech­nic students?

    (5) ‘If you wish to encour­age youths of today…’ hmm… what about youths of yes­ter­day such as miyagi-san? youths of tomor­row such as myself?

    (6) ‘I must reit­er­ate that we are a non-profit organ­i­sa­tion…’ you do not reit­er­ate when you say some­thing for the first time. are you sure you are an organization?

    (7) ‘With your offi­cial endorse­ment, we will be tak­ing a giant leap towards a suc­cess­ful peti­tion cam­paign.’ i doubt that your peti­tion will be suc­cess­ful even with mr miyagi’s endorse­ment. no insult meant for miyagi.

  • http://www.duheconomist.com YaN

    that wasn’t nice, leav­ing Bernard’s mobile num uncen­sored in the orig­i­nal letter…

  • http://www.miyagi.sg Mr Miyagi

    Damn! I thought I took it out. Sorry Bernard.

  • lin­coln

    You are get­ting old…

  • nali­nee

    Way to squelch what lit­tle ini­tia­tive and courage our young peo­ple have, you guys!

    At least they are doing some­thing, even with bad gram­mar and sup­posed lack of cour­tesy. When we were younger, we com­plained about noth­ing, and got… what?

    Cut them some slack lah. They are doing some­thing that is unprece­dented, not say they have any­one to learn from. Applaud the action if not the method.

    If not its another gen­er­a­tion of quiet quit­ters, who rather leave than speak out against things they agree.

    Miyagi, really, never known you to be so KL. You usu­ally quite nice leh.

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  • http://www.miyagi.sg Mr Miyagi

    Yes, I have a case of the cranks, I admit.

  • http://www.zonkd.blogspot.com Maria

    did he just make u feel that peo­ple from TP do things this way. i hope not, as far as im con­cerned, hav­ing grad­u­ated from TP, i dont think we are like that :) . I don’t think it was inten­tional though, prob­a­bly an anx­ious attempt to get ur endorsement

  • http://www.miyagi.sg Mr Miyagi

    I think I was just being a prick.

  • http://www.zonkd.blogspot.com Maria

    did he just make u feel that peo­ple from TP do things this way. i hope not, as far as im con­cerned, hav­ing grad­u­ated from TP, i dont think we are like that :) . I don’t think it was inten­tional though, prob­a­bly an anx­ious attempt to get ur endorsement

  • http://www.miyagi.sg Mr Miyagi

    I think I was just being a prick.

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